Crystal ball: Just a couple of months after Cloudflare revealed that bots have officially surpassed human traffic online, the company has given its view on what things will look like in five years. It’s not good news for us fleshy meatsacks: non-human traffic could be up to 1,000 times higher than human traffic.

CDN and cybersecurity giant Cloudflare held its Q2 earnings call on Thursday, during which chief financial officer Thomas Seifert gave a concerning prediction about what the web will look like in the future.

“If the current trends continue, we think in five years, non-human traffic will be as much as 1,000 times as much as human traffic,” he said.

“In other words, humans will be a rounding error on the internet, not because human traffic goes down, but that’s just how fast we’re seeing non-human traffic grow.”

Seifert did add the important caveat that his predictions have been wrong in the past. Cloudflare CEO and co-founder Matthew Prince will likely be able to relate to this. He had predicted that bot traffic would surpass humans at the end of 2027, but it happened earlier this year.

Also read: The Zero Click Internet

It goes without saying that the sudden acceleration in non-human traffic is being driven by AI – agentic AI, specifically. Agentic systems behave very differently from traditional web crawlers and fraud bots. Their activity can closely resemble ordinary browsing, but it happens at machine speed and can be repeated on an enormous scale.

Even a straightforward prompt may trigger thousands of requests. Prince illustrated the difference using online shopping: someone searching for a camera might check five retailers, while an AI agent could examine 5,000 sites on their behalf. Multiply that behavior across millions of users asking assistants to compare products and airfares, research topics, collect information, or condense articles, and you can see why Seifert believes humanity’s online presence will become a rounding error.

Seifert said that if traffic does grow the way he expects, “we’ve got to get a lot more efficient,” which is where Cloudflare’s services come in, of course. He also mentioned the security implications of a web made up pretty much entirely of bots.

The idea that Dead Internet Theory – the concept that the internet is mostly run by bots and AI – will be demonstrably true in a few years (or now, arguably) is a concerning one. For a start, it could see the end of independent sites that have relied on the web’s business model since the 1990s.

There’s also the fact that an internet full of bots, AI slop, and privacy risks is making more people pull away from the online world. In our poll, 97% of people said the internet today was a hellscape compared to its early days, and it looks like things are only going to get worse.

Blaine is a pain, and that is the truth.

Look at the fancy pants here that uses advanced technology like the abacus instead of counting on their nine fingers like the rest of us!

This game looks boring. Graphics are weak. How much XP did you get for the bird friending quest?

Edit: shit, that’s not a bird, is it? Well, don’t I look foolish now?

“In a row?”

Well I’ve already met him, but the first time Jabba the Hut wasn’t in the background, so I’d definitely like a do-over.

Not just the ass, but the oxen and sheep, too!

Yeah, I really enjoy dry sarcasm, but it doesn’t always come across in text. That one’s on me. My bad.

This is antima propaganda. Antima is a terrorist organization, unlike the patriotic Proton Boys.

Some time before I played this game, I reset my TV display settings but apparently forgot to turn game mode back on. I was getting slaughtered by everything and I was so pissed thinking that they just did a bullshit job developing the reaction commands.

The game was a lot more enjoyable after I realized that I was just an idiot.

He’s like the reverend from Footloose without the saving grace of being played by John Lithgow.

Hmm… I wonder how they’d feel about my Bachelor’s in Spanish Language and Culture.